>>>>>The conservative Cato Institute gave Huckabee an "F" for his final term as governor on its Fiscal Policy Report Card...
Two stand out negatives. Double ouch!
“The conservative Cato Institute gave Huckabee an ‘F’ for his final term as governor on its Fiscal Policy Report Card...”
I’m a big fan of Cato, but they’re notoriously tough graders. Even so, they did manage to give Governor Huckabee a “B” during his first term, saying the following:
“Perhaps no current governor has been elevated to the statehouse under stranger circumstances. Huckabee, a Baptist minister, was elected lieutenant governor in 1994. Two and a half years later, Clinton’s heir, Jim Guy Tucker, was convicted of a felony as a result of the Whitewater investigation and was immediately removed from office. In the midst of those tumultuous events, Huckabee became the first Republican governor of Arkansas in recent memory. Upon taking office in July 1996, Huckabee immediately backed a 1/8-cent sales tax hike to fund the Games and Fishing Commission and the Department of Parks and Tourism. The voters enacted that hike as a constitutional amendment in November 1996. In his first budget, however, he redeemed himself by proposing a sweeping overhaul of Arkansas’s archaic income tax system. The $80 million tax cut package was enacted in 1997 and became the first broad-based state tax cut in more than 20 years. It increased the standard deduction, eliminated the income tax ‘marriage penalty,’ and indexed the state tax brackets for inflation.”
Notice that Governor Huckabee would have presumably gotten an “A” from Cato if not for the voter-approved 1/8-cent sales tax increase.